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The Military

Exploding Drone Used in Assassination Attempt on Prime Minister of Iraq (usnews.com) 60

Posted by EditorDavid from the modern-warfare dept.
"A drone laden with explosives targeted the residence of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Baghdad early on Sunday," reports Reuters, "in what the Iraqi military called an attempted assassination, but said Kadhimi escaped unhurt." The attack, which security sources said injured several members of Kadhimi's personal protection, came after protests in the Iraqi capital over the result of a general election last month turned violent. The groups leading protests and complaints about the result of the October vote are heavily-armed Iran-backed militias which lost much of their parliamentary power in the election... No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Kadhimi's residence in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, which houses government buildings and foreign embassies...

Security sources told Reuters that six members of Kadhimi's personal protection force stationed outside his residence had been injured.
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Exploding Drone Used in Assassination Attempt on Prime Minister of Iraq More

Exploding Drone Used in Assassination Attempt on Prime Minister of Iraq

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  • Drones are not great weapons (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday November 07, 2021 @12:26AM (#61964789)

    As this example shows, drones are not as great weapon as you might think at first.

    Yes they are maneuverable, but that agility drops a lot with weight, and without much explosives being able to be carried your destructive force is drastically reduced.

    If you just have a block of C4 (or realistically with a drone part of a block of C4) with no containment you lose a lot of force even several feet away, and you don't get effective shrapnel (which is what really kills people from most military explosives meant to target troops) without a lot of added weight.

    • But I can buy a drone at a department store. I have no idea where I can "just get" a block of C4.

    • The other thing is that they are loud as hell, honking vuvuzela would be more stealthy.

    • You are incorrect because you are measuring efficiency poorly. Efficiency is actually a ratio of success vs X, where X can be anything.

      You can measure efficiency vs
      $ cost
      resources used
      time spent building
      per use
      per solider at risk

      Drone suck at the first 3. They cost more than a bullet, take too much resources to build, take too much time to build, are unlikely to kill on the first use.

      But they risk zero of your own soldiers. Which means their efficiency per friendly life lost is infinite.

      You perso

      • But they risk zero of your own soldiers.

        Somebody has to fly it, and they have to be close enough to direct it effectively. That means they either are in direct line of sight to a target, or have a lot of signal traffic that can be detected.

        Also however they originally acquire the drones means someone is at risk once you track down who purchased the drone (if you don't think they can identify each and every drone origin from many of the parts you are nuts).

        Lastly if the effective rate is near zero you have

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

          Somebody has to fly it, and they have to be close enough to direct it effectively. That means they either are in direct line of sight to a target, or have a lot of signal traffic that can be detected.

          Most drones are RF driven, meaning no line of sight is needed. I've seen countless friends and kids "lose" their drone on the other side of the hill, but they still have the video feed and can keep flying them. It works much better than you seem to think.

          • Most drones are RF driven, meaning no line of sight is needed

            Video feed is not enough to be able to target something effectively, perhaps demonstrated by this very attack. If you are not using line of sight then you have a lot of signal traffic back to your position and from the drone, making it much more likely to be destroyed or jammed by countermeasures (you don't think the very first thing to be jammed by any kind f base in frequencies that commonly transport video feeds from drones?)

            An effective drone

    • What you need to do is have a number of drones in series, spaced maybe 20 feet apart. Each drone explodes on impact, so you can basically blow through multiple walls/doors/whatever.

      Sure you lose a lot of explosive power, but you make up for it in quantity.

      If you want to be even more effective you can have multiple streams of drones.

    • Yeah, but what happens when we have swarms of 100+ OTS drones in an attack? I think they'll start to become quite effective. First wave hits some windows to make an entry point for subsequent waves that start detonating inside the building (perhaps with face detection software for a trigger).
    • The payload doesn't necessarily need to be explosives. Biological agents would probably be even more effective and if you're already trying to use a drone to assassinate someone you probably don't care too much about any of the rules in the first place.
  • Oh drone, you delivered blood yesterday and today you are spilling it.

  • You know, a drone is basically just a flying blender. Some of these assassinations would have been more successful if they had just driven the drone into the target at neck height and decapitated them – in fact decapitations are notorious in model helicopter accidents already.

    I’ll see your “flying ginsu” Hellfire R9x and raise you a $2000 model helicopter controlled via a $100 cellular phone from halfway around the globe.

    • You know, a drone is basically just a flying blender. Some of these assassinations would have been more successful if they had just driven the drone into the target at neck height and decapitated them â" in fact decapitations are notorious in model helicopter accidents already.

      Helis have enough prop for that to be a real hazard. Not that multicopters aren't dangerous, but since they have more props no individual prop has as much energy as a heli blade and it's much harder for that to happen, as evinced by the relative lack of decapitations in multicopter accidents.

      If you want to make manhacks they're gonna have to be singlecopters, realistically. I suppose there's no reason you couldn't use them, but their big downside is cost. Sure, an arduino can fly a singlecopter as well as i

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